The Last Crusade

John Buchan

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The Last Crusade

Francis Martendale’s Story

‘It is often impossible, in these political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any
moral causes we may assign, and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up chat operation to mere
chance; or, more piously (perhaps more rationally), to the occasional interposition and the irresistible hand of the
Great Disposer.’

BURKE.

One evening the talk at dinner turned on the Press. Lamancha was of opinion that the performances of
certain popular newspapers in recent years had killed the old power of the anonymous printed word. ‘They bluffed too
high,’ he said, ‘and they had their bluff called. All the delphic oracle business has gone from them. You haven’t today
what you used to have — papers from which the ordinary man docilely imbibes all his views. There may be one or two
still, but not more.’

Sandy Arbuthnot, who disliked journalism as much as he liked journalists, agreed, but there was a good deal of
difference of opinion among the others. Pallister–Yeates thought that the Press had more influence than ever, though it
might not be much liked; a man, he said, no longer felt the kind of loyalty towards his newspaper that he felt towards
his club and his special brand of cigar, but he was mightily influenced by it all the same. He might read it only for
its news, but in the selection of news a paper could wield an uncanny power.

Francis Martendale was the only journalist among us, and he listened with half-closed sleepy eyes. He had been a war
correspondent as far back as the days of the South African War, and since then had seen every serious row on the face
of the globe. In France he had risen to command a territorial battalion, and that seemed to have satisfied his military
interest, for since 1919 he had turned his mind to business. He was part-owner of several provincial papers, and was
connected in some way with the great Ladas news agency. He had several characters which he kept rigidly separate. One
was a philosopher, for he had translated Henri Poincare, and published an acute little study of Bergson; another was a
yachtsman, and he used to race regularly in the twelve-metre class at Cowes. But these were his relaxations, and five
days in the week he spent in an office in the Fleet Street neighbourhood. He was an enthusiast about his hobbies and a
cynic about his profession, a not uncommon mixture; so we were surprised when he differed from Lamancha and Sandy and
agreed with Palliser–Yeates.

‘No doubt the power of the leader-writer has waned,’ he said. ‘A paper cannot set a Cabinet trembling because it
doesn’t like its policy. But it can colour the public mind most damnably by a steady drip of tendencious news.’

‘Lies?’ Sandy asked.

‘Not lies — truths judiciously selected — half-truths with no context. Facts — facts all the time. In these days the
Press is obliged to stick to facts. But it can make facts into news, which is a very different class of goods. And it
can interpret facts — don’t forget that. It can report that Burminster fell asleep at a public dinner — which he did —
in such a way as to make everybody think that he was drunk — which he wasn’t.’

‘Rather a dirty game?’ someone put in.

‘Sometimes — often perhaps. But now and then it works out on the side of the angels. Do any of you know Roper
Willinck?’

There was a general confession of ignorance.

‘Pity. He would scarcely fit in here, but he is rather a great man and superbly good company. There was a little
thing that Willinck once did — or rather helped to do, with about a million other people who hadn’t a notion what was
happening. That’s the fun of journalism. You light a match and fling it away, and the fire goes smouldering round the
globe, and ten thousand miles off burns down a city. I’ll tell you about it if you like, for it rather proves my
point.’

It all began — said Martendale — with an old Wesleyan parson of the name of Tubb, who lived at a place called
Rhenosterspruit on the east side of the Karroo. He had been a missionary, but the place had grown from a small native
reserve to an ordinary up-country dorp; the natives were all Christians now, and he had a congregation of
store-keepers, and one or two English farmers, and the landlady of the hotel, and the workmen from an adjacent
irrigation dam. Mr Tubb was a man of over seventy, a devoted pastor with a gift of revivalist eloquence, but not
generally considered very strong in the head. He was also a bachelor. He had caught a chill and had been a week in bed,
but he rose on the Sunday morning to conduct service as usual.

Now about that time the Russian Government had been rather distinguishing themselves. They had had a great function
at Easter, run by what they called the Living Church, which had taken the shape of a blasphemous parody of the
Christian rites and a procession of howling dervishes who proclaimed that God was dead and Heaven and Hell wound up.
Also they had got hold of a Patriarch, a most respected Patriarch, put him on trial for high treason, and condemned him
to death. They had postponed the execution, partly by way of a refinement of cruelty, and partly, I suppose, to see
just how the world would react; but there seemed not the slightest reason to doubt that they meant to have the old
man’s blood. There was a great outcry, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope had something to say, and various
Governments made official re-presentations, but the Bolshies didn’t give a hoot. They felt that they needed to indulge
in some little bit of extra blackguardism just to show what stout fellows they were.

Well, all this was in the cables from Riga and Warsaw and Helsingfors, and it got into the weekly edition of the
Cape Times. There Mr Tubb read it, as he lay sick in bed, and, having nothing else to worry about, it fretted him
terribly. He could not bear to think of those obscene orgies in Moscow, and the story of the Patriarch made him
frantic. This, it seemed to him, was a worse persecution than Nero’s or Diocletian’s, and the Patriarch was a nobler
figure than any martyr of the Roman amphitheatre; and all the while the Christian peoples of the world were doing
nothing. So Mr Tubb got out of bed on that Sunday morning, and, having had no time to prepare a sermon, delivered his
soul from the pulpit about the Bolshies and their doings. He said that what was needed was a new crusade, and he called
on every Christian man and woman to devote their prayers, their money, and, if necessary, their blood to this supreme
cause. Old as he was, he said, he would gladly set off for Moscow that instant and die beside the Patriarch, and count
his life well lost in such a testimony of his faith.

I am sure that Mr Tubb meant every word he said, but he had an unsympathetic audience, who were not interested in
Patriarchs; and the hotel-lady slumbered, and the store-keepers fidgeted and the girls giggled and whispered just as
usual. There the matter would have dropped, had not a young journalist from Cape Town been spending his holidays at
Rhenosterspruit and out of some caprice been present at the service. He was an ambitious lad, and next morning
despatched to his paper a brightly written account of Mr Tubb’s challenge. He wrote it with his tongue in his cheek,
and headed it, ‘Peter the Hermit at Rhenosterspruit’ with, as a sub-title, ‘The Last Crusade’. His editor cut it
savagely, and left out all his satirical touches, so that it read rather bald and crude. Still it got about a quarter
of a column.

That week the Ladas representative at Cape Town was rather short of material, and just to fill up his budget of
outgoing news put in a short message about Rhenosterspruit. It ran: ‘On Sunday Tubb Wesleyan Minister Rhenosterspruit
summoned congregation in name Christianity release Patriarch and announced intention personally lead crusade Moscow.’
That was the result of the cutting of the bright young correspondent’s article. What he had meant as fantasy and farce
was so summarised as to appear naked facts. Ladas in London were none too well pleased with the message. They did not
issue it to the British Press, and they cabled to the Cape Town people that, while they welcomed ‘human interest’
stories, they drew the line at that sort of thing. What could it matter to the world what a Wesleyan parson in the
Karroo thought about Zinovieff? They wanted news, not nonsense.

Now behold the mysterious workings of the Comic Spirit. Ladas, besides their general service to the Canadian Press,
made special services to several Canadian papers. One of these was called, shall we say, the Toronto Watchman. The
member of the Ladas staff who had the compiling of the Watchman budget was often hard-pressed, for he had to send news
which was not included in the general service. That week he was peculiarly up against it, so he went through the files
of the messages that had come in lately and had not already been transmitted to Canada, and in the Cape Town section he
found the Rhenosterspruit yarn. He seized on it joyfully, for he did not know of the disfavour with which his chief had
regarded it, and he dressed it up nicely for Toronto. The Watchman he knew was a family paper, with a strong religious
connection, and this would be meat and drink to it. So he made the story still more matter-of-fact. Mr Tubb had sounded
a call to the Christian Church, and was himself on the eve of setting out against Trotsky like David against Goliath.
He left the captions to the Toronto sub-editors, but of his own initiative he mentioned John Knox. That, he reflected
comfortably, as he closed up and went off to play golf, would fetch the Presbyterian-minded Watchman.

It did. The Editor of the Watchman, who was an elder of the Kirk and Liberal Member of Parliament, had been getting
very anxious about the ongoings in Russia. He was not very clear what a Patriarch was, but he remembered that various
Anglican ecclesiastics had wanted to affiliate the English and Greek Churches, so he concluded that he was some kind of
Protestant. He had, like most people, an intense dislike of Moscow and its ways, and he had been deeply shocked by the
Easter sacrilege. So he went large on the Ladas message. It was displayed on his chief page, side by side with all the
news he could collect about the Patriarch, and he had no less than two leaders on the subject. The first, which he
wrote himself, was headed ‘The Weak Things of the World and the Strong’. He said that Mr Tubb’s clarion-call, ‘the
voice of a simple man of God echoing from the lonely veld’, might yet prove a turning-point in history, and he quoted
Burke about a child and a girl at an inn changing the fate of nations. It might — it should — arouse the conscience of
the Christian world, and inaugurate a new crusade, which would lift mankind out of the rut of materialism and open its
eyes to the eternal verities. Christianity had been challenged by the miscreants in Russia, and the challenge must be
met. I don’t think he had any very clear idea what he meant, for he was strongly opposed to anything that suggested
war, but it was a fine chance for ‘uplift’ writing. The second leader was called ‘The Deeper Obligations of Empire’,
and, with a side glance at Mr Tubb, declared that unless the British Empire was a spiritual and moral unity it was not
worth talking about.

The rest of the Canadian Press did not touch the subject. They had not had the Rhenosterspruit message, and were not
going to lift it. But the Watchman had a big circulation, and Mr Tubb began to have a high, if strictly local, repute.
Several prominent clergymen preached sermons on him, and a weekly paper printed a poem in which he was compared to St
Theresa and Joan of Arc.

The thing would have been forgotten in a fortnight, if McGurks had not chosen to take a hand. McGurks, as you
probably know, is the biggest newspaper property in the world directed by a single hand. It owns outright well over a
hundred papers, and has a controlling interest in perhaps a thousand. Its tone is strictly national, not to say
chauvinistic; its young men in Europe at that time were all hundred-per-cent Americans, and returned to the States a
hundred and twenty per cent, to allow for the difference in the exchange. McGurks does not love England, for it began
with strong Irish connections, and it has done good work in pointing out to its immense public the predatory character
of British Imperialism and the atrocities that fill the shining hours in India and Egypt. As a matter of fact, however,
its politics are not very serious. What it likes is a story that can be told in thick black headlines, so that the
stupidest of its free-born readers, glancing in his shirt-sleeves at the first page of his Sunday paper, can extract
nourishment. Murders, rapes, fires and drownings are its daily bread, and it fairly revels in details — measurements
and plans, names and addresses of witnesses, and appalling half-tone blocks. Most unfairly it is called sensational,
for the stuff is as dull as a directory.

With regard to Russia, McGurks had steered a wavy course. It had begun in 1917 by flaunting the banner of freedom,
for it disliked monarchies on principle. In 1919 it wanted America to recognise the Russian Government, and take hold
of Russian trade. But a series of rebuffs to its special correspondents changed its view, and by 1922 it had made a
speciality of Bolshevik horrors. The year 1923 saw it again on the fence, from which in six months it had tumbled off
in a state of anti-Bolshevik hysteria. It was out now to save God’s country from foreign microbes, and it ran a good
special line of experts who proved that what America needed was a cordon sanitaire to protect her purity from a
diseased world. At the time of which I speak it had worked itself up into a fine religious enthusiasm, and had pretty
well captured the ‘hick’ public. McGurks was first and foremost a business proposition, and it had decided that crime
and piety were the horses to back. I should add that, besides its papers, it ran a news agency, the P.U., which stood
for Press Union, but which was commonly and affectionately known as Punk.

McGurks seized upon the story in the Toronto Watchman as a gift from the gods, and its headlines were a joy for
ever. All over the States men read ‘Aged Saint Defies Demoniacs — Says That In God’s Name He Will Move Mountains’ —
‘Vengeance From The Veld’ — ‘The First Trumpet Blast’ — ‘Who Is On The Lord’s Side — WHO?’ I daresay that in the East
and beyond the Rockies people were only mildly interested, but in the Middle West and in the South the thing caught
like measles. McGurks did not leave its stunts to perish of inanition. As soon as it saw that the public was intrigued
it started out to organise that interest. It circularised every parson over big areas, it arranged meetings of protest
and sympathy, it opened subscription lists, and, though it refrained from suggesting Government action, it made it
clear that it wanted to create such a popular feeling that the Government would be bound to bestir itself. The home
towns caught fire, the Bible Belt was moved to its foundations, every Methodist minister rallied to his co-religionist
of Rhenosterspruit, the Sunday Schools uplifted their voice, and even the red-blooded he-men of the Rotary Clubs got
going. The Holiness Tabernacle of Sarcophagus, Neb., produced twenty volunteers who were ready to join Mr Tubb in
Moscow, and the women started knitting socks for them, just as they did in the War. The First Consecration Church of
Jumpersville, Tenn., followed suit, and McGurks made the most of the doings of every chapel in every one-horse
township. Punk, too, was busy, and cabled wonderful stories of the new crusade up and down the earth. Old-established
papers did not as a rule take the Punk service, so only a part of it was printed, but it all helped to create an
atmosphere.

Presently Concord had to take notice. This, as you know, is the foremost American press agency — we call it the C.C.
— and it had no more dealings with Punk than the Jews with the Samaritans. It was in close alliance with Ladas, so it
cabled testily wanting to know why it had not received the Rhenosterspruit message. Ladas replied that they had
considered the story too absurd to waste tolls on, but, since the C.C. was now carrying a lot of stuff about the new
crusade, they felt obliged to cable to Cape Town to clear things up. Punk had already got on to that job, and was
asking its correspondents for pictures of Rhenosterspruit, interviews with the Reverend Tubb, details about what he
wore and ate and drank, news of his mother and his childhood, and his premonitions of future greatness. Haifa dozen
anxious journalists converged upon Rhenosterspruit.

But they were too late. For Mr Tubb was dead — choked on a chicken-bone at his last Sunday dinner. They were only in
time to attend the funeral in the little, dusty, sun-baked cemetery. Very little was to be had from his congregation,
which, as I have said, had been mostly asleep during the famous sermon; but a store-keeper remembered that the minister
had not been quite like himself on that occasion and that he had judged from his eyes that he had still a bad cold.
McGurks made a great fuss with this scrap of news. The death of Mr Tubb was featured like the demise of a President or
a film star, and there was a moving picture of the old man, conscious that he was near his end (the chicken-bone was
never mentioned), summoning his falling strength to one supreme appeal —‘his eyes,’ said McGurks, ‘now wet with tears
for the world’s sins, now shining with the reflected radiance of the Better Country’.

I fancy that the thing would have suddenly died away, for there was a big prize-fight coming on, and there seemed to
be a risk of the acquittal of a nigger who had knifed a bootlegger in Chicago, and an Anti–Kink Queen was on the point
of engaging herself to a Dentifrice King, and similar stirring public events were in the offing. But the death of Mr
Tubb kept up the excitement, for it brought in the big guns of the Fundamentalists. It seemed to them that the old man
had not died but had been miraculously translated, just like Elijah or William Jennings Bryan after the Dayton trial.
It was a Sign, and they were bound to consider what it signified.

This was much heavier metal than the faithful of Sarcophagus and Jumpersville. The agitation was now of national
importance; it had attained ‘normalcy’, as you might say, the ‘normalcy’ of the periodic American movement. Conventions
were summoned and addressed by divines whose names were known even in New York. Senators and congressmen took a hand,
and J. Constantine Buttrick, the silver trumpet of Wisconsin, gave tongue, and was heard by several million wireless
outfits. Articles even appeared about it in the intellectual weeklies. Congress wasn’t in session, which was fortunate,
but Washington began to be uneasy, for volunteers for the crusade were enrolling fast. The C.C. was compelled to carry
long despatches, and Ladas had to issue them to the English Press, which usually printed them in obscure corners with
the names misspelt. England is always apathetic about American news, and, besides, she had a big strike on her hands at
the time. Those of us who get American press-clippings realised that quite a drive was starting to do something to make
Moscow respectful to religion, but we believed that it would be dropped before any serious action could be taken.
Meanwhile Zinovieff and Trotsky carried on as usual, and we expected any day to hear that the Patriarch had been shot
and buried in the prison yard.

Suddenly Fate sent Roper Willinck mooning round to my office. I suppose Willinck is the least known of our great
men, for you fellows have never even heard his name. But he is a great man in his queer way, and I believe his voice
carries farther than any living journalist’s, though most people do not know who is speaking. He doesn’t write much in
the Press here, only now and then a paper in the heavy monthlies, but he is the prince of special correspondents, and
his ‘London Letters’ in every known tongue are printed from Auckland to Seattle. He seems, to have found the common
denominator of style which is calculated to interest the whole human family. On the Continent he is the only English
journalist whose name is known to the ordinary reader — rather like Maximilian Harden before the War. In America they
reckon him a sort of Pope, and his stuff is syndicated in all the country papers. His enthusiasms make a funny
hotch-potch — The League of Nations and the British Empire, racial purism and a sentimental socialism; but he is a
devout Catholic, and Russia had become altogether too much for him. That was why I thought he would be interested in
McGurks’ stunt, of which he had scarcely heard; so he sat down in an armchair and, during the consumption of five
caporal cigarettes, studied my clippings.

I have never seen a man so roused. ‘I see light,’ he cried, pushing his double glasses up on his forehead.
‘Martendale, this is a revelation. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings . . . Master Ridley, Master
Ridley, we shall this day kindle a fire which will never be extinguished . . . ’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘The thing will fizzle out in a solemn protest from Washington to Moscow with which old Trotsky
will light his pipe. It has got into the hands of highbrows, and in a week will be clothed in the jargon of the State
Department, and the home towns will wonder what has been biting them.’

‘We must retrieve it,’ he said softly. ‘Get it back to the village green and the prayer-meeting. It was the
prayer-meeting, remember, which brought America into the War.’

‘But how? McGurks has worked that beat to death.’

‘McGurks!’ he cried contemptuously. ‘The time is past for slobber, my son. What they want is the prophetic, the
apocalyptic, and by the bones of Habbakuk they shall have it. I am going to solemnise the remotest parts of the great
Republic, and then,’ he smiled serenely, ‘I shall interpret that solemnity to the world. First the fact and then the
moral — that’s the lay-out.’

He stuffed my clippings into his pocket and took himself off, and there was that in his eye which foreboded trouble.
Someone was going to have to sit up when Willinck looked like that. My hope was that it would be Moscow, but the time
was getting terribly short. Any day might bring the news that the Patriarch had gone to his reward.

I heard nothing for several weeks, and then Punk suddenly became active, and carried some extraordinary stuff. It
was mostly extracts from respectable papers in the Middle West and the South, reports of meetings which seemed to have
worked themselves into hysteria, and rumours of secret gatherings of young men which suggested the Ku–Klux-Klan. Moscow
had a Press agency of its own in London, and it began to worry Ladas for more American news. Ladas in turn worried the
C.C., but the C.C. was reticent. There was a Movement, we were told, but the Government had it well in hand, and we
might disregard the scare-stuff Punk was sending; everything that was important and reliable would be in its own
service. I thought I detected Willinck somewhere behind the scenes, and tried to get hold of him, but learned that he
was out of town.

One afternoon, however, he dropped in, and I noticed that his high-boned face was leaner than ever, but that his
cavernous eyes were happy. ‘“The good work goes cannily on”,’ he said — he was always quoting — and he flung at me a
bundle of green clippings.

They were articles of his own in the American Press, chiefly the Sunday editions, and I noticed that he had selected
the really influential country papers — one in Tennessee, one in Kentucky, and a batch from the Corn States.

I was staggered by the power of his stuff — Willinck had never to my knowledge written like this before. He didn’t
rave about Bolshevik crimes — people were sick of that — and he didn’t bang the religious drum or thump the harmonium.
McGurks had already done that to satiety. He quietly took it for granted that the crusade had begun, and that plain men
all over the earth, who weren’t looking for trouble, felt obliged to start out and abolish an infamy or never sleep
peacefully in their beds again. He assumed that presently from all corners of the Christian world there would be an
invading army moving towards Moscow, a thing that Governments could not check, a people’s rising as irresistible as the
change of the seasons. Assuming this, he told them just exactly what they would see. I can’t do justice to Willinck by
merely describing these articles; I ought to have them here to read to you. Noble English they were, and as simple as
the Psalms . . . He pictured the constitution of the army, every kind of tongue and dialect and class, with
the same kind of discipline as Cromwell’s New Model — Ironsides every one of them, rational, moderate-minded fanatics,
the most dangerous kind. It was like Paradise Lost — Michael going out against Belial . . . And then the
description of Russia — a wide grey world, all pale colours and watery lights, broken villages, tattered little towns
ruled by a few miscreants with rifles, railway tracks red with rust, ruinous great palaces plastered over with obscene
posters, starving hope-less people, children with old vicious faces . . . God knows where he got the stuff
from — mainly his macabre imagination, but I daresay there was a lot of truth in the details, for he had his own ways
of acquiring knowledge.

But the end was the masterpiece. He said that the true rulers were not those whose names appeared in the papers, but
one or two secret madmen who sat behind the screen and spun their bloody webs. He described the crusaders breaking
through shell after shell, like one of those Chinese boxes which you open only to find another inside till you end with
a thing like a pea. There were layers of Jew officials and Lett mercenaries and camouflaging journalists, and always as
you went deeper the thing became more inhuman and the air more fetid. At the end you had the demented Mongol — that was
a good touch for the Middle West — the incarnation of the back-world of the Orient. Willinck only hinted at this
ultimate camarilla, but his hints were gruesome. To one of them he gave the name of Uriel — a kind of worm-eaten
archangel of the Pit, but the worst he called Glubet. He must have got the word out of a passage in Catullus which is
not read in schools, and he made a shuddering thing of it — the rancid toad-man, living among the half-lights and
blood, adroit and sleepless as sin, but cracking now and then into idiot laughter.

You may imagine how this took hold of the Bible Belt. I never made out what exactly happened, but I have no doubt
that there were the rudiments of one of those mass movements, before which Governments and newspapers, combines and
Press agencies, Wall Street and Lombard Street and common prudence are helpless. You could see it in the messages C.C.
sent and its agitated service cables to its people. The Moscow Agency sat on our doorstep and bleated for more news,
and all the while Punk was ladling out fire-water to every paper that would take it.

‘So much for the facts,’ Willinck said calmly. ‘Now I proceed to point the moral in the proper quarters!’

If he was good at kindling a fire he was better at explaining just how hot it was and how fast it would spread. I
have told you that he was about the only English journalist with a Continental reputation. Well, he proceeded to
exploit that reputation in selected papers which he knew would cross the Russian frontier. He was busy in the Finnish
and Latvian and Lithuanian Press, he appeared in the chief Polish dally, and in Germany his stuff was printed in one
big Berlin paper and — curiously enough — in the whole financial chain. Willinck knew just how and where to strike. The
line he took was very simple. He quietly explained what was happening in America and the British Dominions — that the
outraged conscience of Christiandom had awakened among simple folk, and that nothing on earth could hold it. It was a
Puritan crusade, the most deadly kind. From every corner of the globe believers were about to assemble, ready to
sacrifice themselves to root out an infamy. This was none of your Denikins and Koltchaks and Czarist emigre affairs; it
was the world’s Christian democracy, and a business democracy. No flag-waving or shouting, just a cold steady
determination to get the job done, with ample money and men and an utter carelessness of what they spent on both.
Cautious Governments might try to obstruct, but the people would compel them to toe the line. It was a militant League
of Nations, with the Bible in one hand and the latest brand of munition in the other.

We had a feverish time at Ladas in those days. The British Press was too much occupied with the strike to pay full
attention, but the Press of every other country was on its hind legs. Presently things began to happen. The extracts
from Pravda and Izvestia, which we got from Riga and Warsaw, became every day more like the howling of epileptic
wolves. Then came the news that Moscow had ordered a very substantial addition to the Red Army. I telephoned this item
to Willinck, and he came round to see me.

‘The wind is rising,’ he said. ‘The fear of the Lord is descending on the tribes, and that we know is the beginning
of wisdom.’

I observed that Moscow had certainly got the wind up, but that I didn’t see why. ‘You don’t mean to say that you
have got them to believe in your precious crusade.’

He nodded cheerfully. ‘Why not? My dear Martendale, you haven’t studied the mentality of these gentry as I have. Do
you realise that the favourite reading of the Russian peasant used to be Milton? Before the War you could buy a
translation of Paradise Lost at every book kiosk in every country fair. These rootless intellectuals have cast off all
they could, but at the back of their heads the peasant superstition remains. They are afraid in their bones of a spirit
that they think is in Puritanism. That’s why this American business worries them so. They think they are a match for
Rome, and they wouldn’t have minded if the racket had been started by the Knights of Columbus or that kind of show. But
they think it comes from the meeting-house, and that scares them cold.’

‘Hang it all,’ I said, ‘they must know the soft thing modern Puritanism is — all slushy hymns and inspirational
advertising.’

‘Happily they don’t. And I’m not sure that their ignorance is not wiser than your knowledge, my emancipated friend.
I’m inclined to think that something may yet come out of the Bible Christian that will surprise the world
. . . But not this time. I fancy the trick has been done. You might let me know as soon as you hear
anything.’ And he moved off, whistling contentedly through his teeth.

He was right. Three days laser we got the news from Warsaw, and the Moscow Agency confirmed it. The Patriarch had
been released and sent across the frontier, and was now being coddled and feted in Poland. I rang up Willinck, and
listened to his modest Nunc dimittis over the telephone.

He said he was going to take a holiday and go into the country to sleep. He pointed out for my edification that the
weak things of the world — meaning himself — could still confound the strong, and he advised me to reconsider the
foundations of my creed in the light of this surprising miracle.

Well, that is my story. We heard no more of the crusade in America, except that the Fundamentalists seemed to have
got a second wind from it and started a large-scale heresy hunt. Several English bishops said that the release of the
Patriarch was an answer to prayer; our Press pointed out how civilisation, if it spoke with one voice, would be
listened to even in Russia; and Labour papers took occasion to enlarge on the fundamental reasonableness and urbanity
of the Moscow Government.

Personally I think that Willinck drew the right moral. But the main credit really belonged to something a great deal
weaker than he — the aged Tubb, now sleeping under a painted cast-iron gravestone among the dust-devils and meerkats of
Rhenosterspruit.

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University of Adelaide
South Australia 5005